Sales Cloud Objects

Salesforce offers many products to start with based on the Industry you're targeting and the area of business you're looking to grow like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, etc. Based on your need, you can always pick the right product for you. But, when you go through the product catalog on the Salesforce website, isn't it overwhelming to go through so many concepts and jargons? To fix it, I'll try to explain some of those products by explaining the business use case of the technical entities that the product offers.

I'll talk only about Sales Cloud in this blog and cover the basic objects related to Sales Cloud here.

Salesforce sales cloud is basically a module in salesforce where the entire sales process is handled and revenues are generated. It helps a businessman to grow their accounts, find customers, and close the deals faster. More leads get generated and it accelerates productivity by providing Insight decisions.

Let me give you an use case for the same.

One of my friend recently started a business of Gems and stones, on both online and a brick and mortar platform. She wanted to scale up the business from where it was then. Now, any business obviously needs customers. So, let's see how Salesforce could solve her problem.

1. Campaign : To take any business to the market, one needs to publicize the business and the product. How do you do that? Through newspaper, online media platforms like Insta, Google AdWords, Website, etc. In Business terms, this is called Campaign

2. Lead : Now, that her campaign is out, customers notice her Product. They may just click on the link on their Instagram feed out of curiosity or sign up for the newsletters on her website or drop in at the store for a casual look while they leave their numbers to stay updated on offers. So, these people may be potential customers to her business, also called Leads, which are generated through the campaigns that are created.

3. Accounts & Contacts : We click on a lot of ads, signup for a lot of newsletters, but do we buy every product that we sign up for? Not really, right? May be 40% of those who signed up on the newsletter found the product interesting. These guys now visit her website again, display their interest, sign up and create an account on her website as customers. These people could either be Jewellery companies that may use the product as raw material or individuals. The company and the information will be stored in Salesforce as Accounts. The information of the individual contacts from these companies who'd be the point of contact would be stored as Contacts.

4. Opportunity : Now, one of those leads/accounts come in and show further interest in the product for a purchase. We can track and manage the potential deals with Salesforce opportunities. Opportunities are deals in progress. Opportunity records track details about deals, including which accounts they’re for, who the players are, and the amount of potential sales. An opportunity is created when a lead is converted. Opportunities can also be created directly for accounts you’re working.

5. Products : Owning a business with multiple products may be difficult when the tracking of each and every product is needed. That's when the "Product" object comes in handy. Products are a base catalog of all the items and services you sell and their standard prices. In this case, there are a list of products like Pearl, Ruby, Sapphire, etc.

6. Quotes : Quotes in Salesforce represents a formal proposal for products and services that you are offering for a specific opportunity. You create a quote from an opportunity and its products. Each opportunity can have multiple associated quotes, and any one of them can be synced with the opportunity.

7. Tasks, Activities : Now that there's a lot going on in the business, the sales people may be overwhelmed with a constant need to keep track of their To-Dos - What's the next action? When to call Customer A? Customer B answered the call, but wants a follow-up discussion to do, etc. With Salesforce, you can keep your to-do list in Salesforce and stay right on top of your deals and accounts. It gives you different tools to maximize productivity—quick ways to create and update tasks, pre-filtered task lists, and task notification options.

8. Asset - As mentioned previously, the gems and stones business of my friend has a lot of products like pearl, ruby, Sapphire, Amber, etc. The object "Product" does a good job of storing data for all things the company owns. But, let's say, I buy some of those Pearls last month and a sapphire this month. So, I, as a consumer, own these three. That's where "Asset" comes in. It stores which products each account has (or had).

2. Campaign Member - In my last blog, I explained what Campaign is. Let's talk about Campaign Member now. One of the campaign that my friend created was an Email Campaign where she sent an email with a discount code to all those who attended her inaugural event. So, campaign members are the contacts and leads in your CRM that you included in the campaign and are trying to market to.

3. Contract - The business I spoke about got into a deal with one of the well reputed jewellery store. It was a mutually beneficial deal and so the two companies decided to have a business partnership with each other. This is when the object "Contact" comes in picture. A contract is a written agreement between parties. Many companies use contracts to define the terms for doing business with other companies. You can use Salesforce to establish and document the contracts that you have with your accounts and opportunities.

4. Contract Line Item - A contract between two companies may or may not cover all the products of the company. So, contract line items are those products covered by a service contract, not by a general contract. You can only use contract line items if you use products in Salesforce.

5. Opportunity Product(Opportunity Line Item) - In the last blog, I mentioned what an Opportunity is. Let's say Customer A shows interests for specific products only. In that case, we'd create Opportunity Product records for that opportunity. Opportunity Products are line items on an opportunity. It will include pricing information for that particular order. It's like a itemization of products that are included with your opportunity.

6. Order - One of the customer in the Gems and Stones business was really fascinated by the product. She was an Opportunity to the business and the line items of products were added to her record. But, Opportunity is only pre-sales. What gets created post sales is "Order", after the payment is done. It's a contract between a company and a customer to provide services or deliver products with a known quantity, price and date.

7. Order Product (Order Item) - A customer placed an order of a handful of Ruby, a couple of Sapphire and a bluestone. These would be the order item corresponding to the order placed by the customer. Itemization of products that are included with your Order is Order Product.

8. Pricebook - Pricebooks provides the list of products and their prices per unit. You can create multiple price books to maintain different prices for the same product based on your business needs. Salesforce will always provide you a Standard Price Book. The moment you add a Product into Salesforce and set the price of the Product, that Product will go into Standard Price Book. But you can create Custom Price Book as well. In the business use case I spoke about, there are both domestic and international customers for the business. So, the price base of both differs. Which is where it was helpful to have two different pricebooks.

9. Pricebook Entry - These are the junction objects between Product and the pricebook. It allows products to be linked to standard price book or custom price book with a price for a given currency. To give an example. The two pricebooks in this business are India Pricebook and America Pricebook. India Pricebook contains the list of products along with it's price in INR. The America Pricebook contains the list of the products with an elevated price considering the extra charges with it's price in USD.

10. QuoteLineItem - I explained what a Quote is in my last blog. Quote lines has the itemization of elements within a Quote. It stores information about products that a sales rep has quoted.

11. Case - With the business up and running, it's inevitable for customers to have queries and concerns related to their order, account etc. A case is used to capture a customer's question or feedback on Salesforce. It helps in tracking and closure of issues.

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